Glaciers melting at a faster rate, new study finds

Accelerating pace of melt contributing more than 20 percent to sea level rise, threatens populous coastal cities.

Nearly all of the world’s glaciers are losing mass – and at an accelerated pace, according to a new study that experts said painted an “alarming picture”. The research published on Wednesday in the science journal Nature provides one of the most wide-ranging overviews yet of ice mass loss from about 220,000 glaciers around the world, a major source of sea-level rise. Using high-resolution imagery from NASA’s Terra satellite from 2000-2019, a group of international scientists found that glaciers, with the exception of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets which were excluded from the study, lost an average of 267 gigatonnes of ice per year.